Archive for the 'INVENTION' Category

Nils Bohlin, the Swedish engineer and inventor responsible for the three-point lap and shoulder seatbelt–considered one of the most important innovations in automobile safety, was born in Härnösand, Sweden.

Before 1959, only the two-point lap belts were available in automobiles; for the most part, the only people who regularly buckled up were race car drivers.

In 1942 Bohlin started working for the aircraft maker Saab as an aircraft designer and helped develop ejection seats. In 1958 he joined Volvo as a safety engineer where he invented the three-point safety belt, now a standard safety feature in all cars.

Alexander Graham Bell (March 3, 1847 – August 2, 1922) at the opening of the long-distance line from New York to Chicago in 1892.

On this day in 1876, 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for his revolutionary new invention…the telephone.

The Scottish-born Bell worked in London with his father, Melville Bell, who developed Visible Speech, a written system used to teach speaking to the deaf. In the 1870s, the Bells moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where the younger Bell found work as a teacher at the Pemberton Avenue School for the Deaf.

While in Boston, Bell became very interested in the possibility of transmitting speech over wires. Samuel F.B. Morse’s invention of the telegraph in 1843 made communication possible between two distant points and Bell, wanting to improve on this, created a “harmonic telegraph,” a device that combined aspects of the telegraph and record player to allow individuals to speak to each other from a distance.

With the help of Thomas A. Watson, a Boston machine shop employee, Bell developed a prototype of his first telephone. Three days after filing the patent, the telephone carried its first intelligible message–the famous “Mr. Watson, come here, I need you”–from Bell to his assistant. (A&E Television)